07-30-2010, 08:07 PM
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:I do hope to eventually make molds of kitbashes i make, but i'm curious, if i were to cut up a RailPower Products SD45 and some other engines and make a totally different engine (using the pieces), does it still count as copying the original manufacturer's work (as i didn't individually build the thing from scratch)?
It does not matter if you use part or all of a manufactured product, it is copyright infringement. The original manufacturer had to make grilles, fans, doors, and various small details to produce the model. If he hired a pattern maker to make it, he paid for the pattern maker's time. If he did it himself, he had his own time invested in it. It is common for the major manufacturers to reuse some detail in different models if a different model had the same type of grille or other detail, but the manufacturer had the original pattern made up. An example is the owner of Railmaster Hobbies who lives near me.
He bought railmaster Products, a line of S-scale kits, but he also makes some unique speakers for installing sound in locomotives. The speakers are not unique, but his are enclosed in small plastic boxes that makes them unique. He pays a pattern maker to make molds for the speaker boxes. The speaker boxes are absolutely necessary to get decent sound out of a model locomotive. If they aren't there, the sound going out the back of the speaker will tend to cancel out the sound coming out the front. If you use someone else's standard speakers in your sound locomotive, and don't provide some sort of baffle you will loose a lot of the base. He didn't say how much, but it costs him quite a bit for the tooling for those little speaker boxes. His newest one is small enough to fit below the fans above the gear tower over the rear truck of any Athearn with a scale width hood. I think it will also fit over the front gear tower of an Sw from almost any manufacturer in HO scale. Those speaker boxes are just that a small box open on one side for the speaker horn to face out, but if someone "knocked off" one of his speaker boxes and produced a competing product for a fraction of the price because they used his box as a pattern, they would be stealing his property.
The difference is that if you cut up an Athearn shell, an Atlas shell, and an Intermountain shell for instance to kitbash a single locomotive, you are now guilty of copyright infringement to three manufacturers instead of one with triple the possible damages!